BOSTON (AP) — Inside the wide mouth of a stoneware jar, Daisy Whitner’s fingertips found a slight rise in the clay — a mark she hoped was a trace left behind by her ancestor, an enslaved potter who shaped the vessel nearly 175 years ago in South Carolina.
Standing in the gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston last week, Whitner said she felt a quiet connection to her ancestor, David Drake, in that moment.
“I was telling the kids, ’Inside this jar, I’m sure I’m feeling his tears, sweat drops off his face, his arms,’” said 86-year-old Whitner, a Washington, D.C., resident and a retired account manager for The Washington Post.
The jar is one of two returned to Drake’s family as part of a historic agreement this month between Drake’s descendants and the MFA Boston, one of the institutions that holds pieces of his work.
The vessels are among hundreds of surviving works by “Dave the Potter,” an enslaved man who labored in the alkaline-glazed stoneware potteries of Edgefield, South Carolina, in the decades before and during the Civil War. Dave signed many of his jars — and inscribed some with rhyming couplets — an extraordinary and unparalleled assertion of identity and authorship during a time when literacy for enslaved people was criminalized.
The agreement represents what experts say is the first major case of art restitution involving works created by an enslaved person in the U.S. — a process traditionally associated with families seeking the return of art looted by the Nazis during World War II. It’s also rare: as enslaved people were denied legal personhood and documentation, tracing the ownership or lineage of their works is often impossible.
Children’s book author Yaba Baker, Dave’s 54-year-old fourth-generation grandson, called the return “a spiritual restoration.” Baker, whose first two children’s books explore Black history, said the family felt a dual sense of pride and grief.
“We don’t want to hide them away in our house. We want other people to be inspired by it,” Baker said. “We want people to know that this person, Dave the Potter, who was told he was nothing but a tool to be used, realized he had humanity. He deserved his own name on his pots. He deserved to write poetry. He deserved to know who he was.”
Much of Dave’s poetry followed Christian themes. As he aged, he wrote more and explored themes related to his enslavement. For the Drake descendants, encountering Dave’s work has been both moving and difficult — a collision of pride in his artistry and grief for the conditions in which he lived.
